ORLANDO, Fla.—The two town halls couldn’t have been any more different — one a blue-jeans-and-ball-cap affair, rowdy and filled-to-capacity near an impoverished urban strip — the other a smaller confab of polo-shirt-and-Bermuda-shorts clad seniors in a sleek conference room outside Orlando.
But one sentiment resonated through both Rep. Allen West’s Pompano Beach gathering in south Florida and Rep. Dan Webster’s in Winter Garden: voters are still angry, they still don’t trust Washington, and they’re saying, “hell yeah, shut down the government if you have to.”
Webster, who preferred his constituents sound off on their opinions rather than ask questions, heard it this way: “If we have to shut the government down, don’t believe those polls you get out of the media. The people are behind you.”
West, who entertained questions from a long line of voters, had this takeaway message from his constituents: “There’s a very good possibility that government will shut down. I know the Democrats have their talking points lined up. They’ll blame us for everything. What will we do?”
The voter vibe this week in Florida — the nation’s largest swing state — matters in Washington because the state sent seven Republican freshmen to Congress last year, and this recess week, they’re pitching voters on the $61 billion in spending cuts they attached to a measure to fund the government through the rest of the year. And while Republican members have insisted they don’t want a government shutdown, the message they’re hearing from constituents suggests they’d have the base support for it.
If these snapshots from congressional town halls in Florida — in districts where voters kicked Democrats out last November — are any indication of the mood on the homefront for Republican freshmen, it’s going to much tougher for Speaker John Boehner to win votes for a middle-of-the-road compromise with Democrats before the government runs out of money on March 4.
“There’s absolutely an undercurrent of rage in Florida and across the country with out-of-control spending, so any curbing of this out-of-control spending is going to be supported,” says State Rep. Dennis Baxley of Ocala, who served with some of the Florida freshmen in the state Legislature. “I don’t think people are nearly as worried about government shutting down as they are about spending us into oblivion. The first time they heard it—that was a shock factor. Now it’s like, ‘Great, why don’t they shut down the government for a couple of months?’ It’s a different emotional response to it.”
Many town hall participants want to make sure the people they sent to Washington don’t go soft.
“I don’t think the Republicans can back off the position that they’re on. Whether the government shuts down, as I see it, is entirely up to the president and the Senate,” said Larry Snowden, a volunteer for West’s congressional campaign whose business card featured not a job title, but a portrait of the Liberty Bell and a quote from Thomas Jefferson.
Snowden said Republicans had an advantage with the shutdown politics. “I feel that the stronger position is strictly emotional—the president is still in power and the Senate is still controlled by Democrats,” he said at the Pompano Beach town hall event. “The House is acting by the mandate the voters gave us in 2010.”
Editor’s Note: This article first appeared in The Politico on 4/23/2011.
